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takyon writes:

Hot on the heels of Snapchat/Snap Inc, Intel is teaming up with Luxottica to release smartglasses for athletes:

The new glasses, dubbed "Radar Pace", will be sold on the Oakley.com website and in some stores of the Californian brand that Luxottica acquired in 2007. The glasses can create a personalized training programme for athletes by interpreting data in real time.

Also at CNET.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

When people are deprived of food, a number of biological mechanisms are set in motion to adapt the body's metabolism to the conditions of scarcity. One of these processes has been revealed by a team of Belgian researchers, led by professor Karolien De Bosscher (VIB-Ghent University). The scientists discovered how three important proteins collaborate on a genetic level to provide a response to long-term fasting. The insights are published in the leading scientific journal Nucleic Acids Research, and could ultimately be put to use in clinical environments to treat metabolic diseases more efficiently.

[...] The researchers uncovered that long-term fasting triggers specific proteins. One of those recognizes the stress hormone cortisol, another one senses the amount of fatty acids (important energy sources), and a third protein called 'AMPK' detects cellular energy. Particularly the discovery of AMPK teaming up with these other sensors within the cell nucleus in a state of food deprivation came as a real surprise.

Prof. Karolien De Bosscher (VIB-Ghent University): "Together with the other proteins, AMPK plays a more direct role than previously assumed. Apart from functioning outside a cell's nucleus as an energy sensor, we found the protein inside the nucleus as well, in a complex with the other two proteins. This complex stimulates the expression of metabolic genes coding for metabolic enzymes, which in turn control the sugar and fat metabolism. In short, AMPK plays a crucial role in a coordinated defense response to food deprivation."

By better understanding the interactions of the three essentials[sic] proteins, the research teams hopes it will eventually be possible to mimic their effect in a controlled environment.

Open access is available to: Abstract, Full Article (HTML), Full Article (PDF), and Supplementary Data.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story from Bruce Schneier's blog:

Every few years, a researcher replicates a security study by littering USB sticks around an organization's grounds and waiting to see how many people pick them up and plug them in, causing the autorun function to install innocuous malware on their computers. These studies are great for making security professionals feel superior. The researchers get to demonstrate their security expertise and use the results as "teachable moments" for others. "If only everyone was more security aware and had more security training," they say, "the Internet would be a much safer place."

Enough of that. The problem isn't the users: it's that we've designed our computer systems' security so badly that we demand the user do all of these counterintuitive things. Why can't users choose easy-to-remember passwords? Why can't they click on links in emails with wild abandon? Why can't they plug a USB stick into a computer without facing a myriad of viruses? Why are we trying to fix the user instead of solving the underlying security problem?

Traditionally, we've thought about security and usability as a trade-off: a more secure system is less functional and more annoying, and a more capable, flexible, and powerful system is less secure. This "either/or" thinking results in systems that are neither usable nor secure.

[...] We must stop trying to fix the user to achieve security. We'll never get there, and research toward those goals just obscures the real problems. Usable security does not mean "getting people to do what we want." It means creating security that works, given (or despite) what people do. It means security solutions that deliver on users' security goals without­ -- as the 19th-century Dutch cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoffs aptly put it­ -- "stress of mind, or knowledge of a long series of rules."

[...] "Blame the victim" thinking is older than the Internet, of course. But that doesn't make it right. We owe it to our users to make the Information Age a safe place for everyone -- ­not just those with "security awareness."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Rosetta spacecraft has delivered its best (and final) images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko:

Just before settling to a soft crash landing Friday, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft captured close-range images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, peering into a stadium-sized pit and recording a final dataset to keep scientists busy long after the mission's end.

The craft's OSIRIS science camera took images throughout Rosetta's descent and sent the data back to Earth in real-time. The final image came from an altitude of 65 feet (20 meters) above the comet, just before ground controllers received the last signal from Rosetta at 1119 GMT (7:19 a.m. EDT).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A few hundred thousand cameras want to talk to you:

A hacker has released computer source code that allows relatively unsophisticated people to wage the kinds of extraordinarily large assaults that recently knocked security news site KrebsOnSecurity offline and set new records for so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks.

KrebsOnSecurity's Brian Krebs reported on Saturday that the source code for "Mirai," a network of Internet-connected cameras and other "Internet of things" devices, was published on Friday. Dale Drew, the chief security officer at Internet backbone provider Level 3 Communications, told Ars that Mirai is one of two competing IoT botnet families that have recently menaced the Internet with record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks—including the one that targeted Krebs with 620 gigabits per second of network traffic, and another that hit French webhost OVH and reportedly peaked at more than 1 terabit per second. [...] According to Krebs, the Mirai source code was posted to the hacking community HackForums by a user with the handle Anna-senpai. Krebs said the leaker provided the following explanation:

When I first go in DDoS industry, I wasn't planning on staying in it long. I made my money, there's lots of eyes looking at IOT now, so it's time to GTFO. So today, I have an amazing release for you. With Mirai, I usually pull max 380k bots from telnet alone. However, after the Kreb [sic] DDoS, ISPs been slowly shutting down and cleaning up their act. Today, max pull is about 300k bots, and dropping.

Previously: A Source for Recent DDoS Attacks

Original Submission

takyon writes:

https://www.cnet.com/news/reykjavik-turns-off-street-lamps-so-citizens-can-view-the-northern-lights/

The northern lights have been blazing their beauty across Icelandic skies all last week, but it's a lot easier to watch nature's light show if the city lights themselves aren't so darn bright. So, on Wednesday night the Reykjavik city council turned off the lights in parts of the city so residents could ooh and aah at a clearer display.

The city street lights in most neighborhoods were scheduled to go dark between 10 and 11 p.m., though that time was reportedly extended when the northern lights were a little late to the party. Locals were asked to help by keeping the lights off in their homes. They were asked to drive carefully on the darker -than-normal streets, and the fire, police and power company were warned in advance, according to Iceland Monitor.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes in with the news that Earth Island Journal reports

Some of our favorite foods and drinks could be considered "endangered" because the places where they are grown are being severely impacted by climate change. If this isn't proof that we need to do something about climate change, I don't know what is. To start off, here are a few foods that are part of our every lives that might not be around for long.

• Coffee
• Chocolate
• Beer
• Maple Syrup
• Seafood: Lobsters and Salmon
• Peanut Butter
• Potatoes

What can we do about it?

Some farmers and researchers have started looking into bringing back ancient or near-extinct crops that might be better suited for this new reality.

Amaranth is one example. Once considered a sacred grain by the Aztec, amaranth was banned by the Spanish because it was used in sacrificial ceremonies.

[...] Cultivated in Ethiopia for more than 7,000 years, the enset plant is known as the "false banana" because of its similarity to the banana tree. It can withstand heavy drought and heavy rain, making it a plant that can naturally withstand climate change. [It] produces two times more food per unit of land than cereal crops.

[...] While most plants making a comeback are known for being drought resistant and having a high tolerance for heat, other plants (like taro) can be grown in flooded areas, a concern for rising sea levels in Asia and other parts of the world.

[...] Some believe that [...] seed banks are the best way to prepare for climate change. John Torgrimson, executive director of the Seed Savers Exchange in the United States, told Truthout that "while not every traditional variety tastes great or looks great, its genetics may be invaluable 50 or 100 years from now when the climate is different. There are qualities in varieties that we don't even know about. It might be resistant to a particular disease; it may grow well in a particular region; it may have certain traits that will allow us to deal with climactic conditions going forward. Diversity is an insurance policy".

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century's end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Why did Keynes' promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the '60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn't figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we've collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment's reflection shows it can't really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the '20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

[...] And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. These are what I propose to call "bullshit jobs."

It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen.

http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.

Ed Note: Link to John Maynard Keynes was NOT in the original article.

Original Submission

DBCubix writes:

Wikileaks has abruptly canceled a much-anticipated announcement on Tuesday. The announcement had been expected to be founder Julian Assange's long-promised document dump on Hillary Clinton.

NBC's Jesse Rodriguez reported that the Tuesday announcement — which was to come from the balcony of London's Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange has sought sanctuary for years – was canceled due to security concerns.

Wikileaks has not said when it will now make its announcement.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story. It is an interesting take on how 'old tech' can still out perform 'new tech' in certain situations.

In short, Greg said, kernel developers still use email because it is faster than any of the alternatives. Over the course of the last year, the project accepted about eight changes per hour — every hour — from over 4,000 developers sponsored by over 400 companies. It must be doing something right. The list of maintainers who accepted at least one patch per day contains 75 entries; at the top of the list, Greg himself accepted 9,781 patches over the year. Given that he accepts maybe one third of the patches sent his way, it is clear that the patch posting rate is much higher than that.

Finding tools that can manage that sort of patch rate is hard. A poor craftsman famously complains about his tools, Greg said, but a good craftsman knows how to choose excellent tools.

So which tools are available for development work? Greg started by looking at GitHub, which, he said, has a number of advantages. It is "very very pretty" and is easy to use for small projects thanks to its simple interface. GitHub offers free hosting and unlimited bandwidth, and can (for a fee) be run on a company's own infrastructure. It makes life easy for the authors of drive-by patches; Greg uses it for the usbutils project and gets an occasional patch that way.

On the other hand, GitHub does not scale to larger projects. He pointed at the Kubernetes project, which has over 4,000 open issues and 511 open pull requests. The system, he said, does not work well for large numbers of reviewers. It has a reasonable mechanism for discussion threads attached to pull requests — GitHub has duplicated email for that feature, he said — but only the people who are actually assigned to a pull request can see that thread. GitHub also requires online access, but there are a lot of kernel developers who, for whatever reason, do not have good access to the net while they are working. In general, it is getting better, but projects like Kubernetes are realizing that they need to find something better suited to their scale; it would never work for the kernel.

[More ...]

janrinok writes:

From https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-asks-court-block-us-prosecuting-security-researcher-detecting-and-publishing we learn that the EFF is helping fight the case of a Security Researcher:

Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a court Thursday for an order that would prevent the government from prosecuting its client, security researcher Matthew Green, for publishing a book about making computer systems more secure.

Green is writing a book about methods of security research to recognize vulnerabilities in computer systems. This important work helps keep everyone safer by finding weaknesses in computer code running devices critical to our lives—electronic devices, cars, medical record systems, credit card processing, and ATM transactions. Green's aim is to publish research that can be used to build more secure software.

But publishing the book, tentatively entitled Practical Cryptographic Engineering, could land Green in jail under an onerous and unconstitutional provision of copyright law. To identify security vulnerabilities in a device he has purchased, Green must work directly with copyrighted computer code, bypassing control measures meant to prevent the code from being accessed. Even though this kind of research is traditionally a "fair use" permitted by copyright law, Digital Millennium Copyright Act  (DMCA) Section 1201 threatens criminal and civil penalties— including jail time—for performing it or publishing information about the methods of security research. The exemptions Congress included in the 1998 DMCA to protect security researchers from prosecution are vague, limited, and provide inadequate assurance against the serious legal ramifications of Section 1201 lawsuits—something the government itself has acknowledged.

"Under Section 1201, computer researchers can face serious penalties just for selling a book that would help people build better, more secure computer systems," said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. "As we explained when we filed a legal challenge to the law in July, such penalties violate the First Amendment and threaten ordinary people for publishing research or even talking about circumventing computer code that's embedded in nearly everything we own. With the lawsuit underway, we're asking the court to bar the government from prosecuting Dr. Green so he can publish a book that's clearly in the public interest."

[...] For more about this case: https://www.eff.org/cases/green-v-us-department-justice

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Ted Cruz has said that the US-ICANN internet deal, which went through Saturday morning, threatens free speech online. Capping a highly politicized debate, the US government on Saturday let go of its remaining grip on the internet, handing control of the net's address book to a non-profit.

Saying free speech in the virtual realm was at stake, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and others had tried to block the transfer. But a federal judge denied on Friday their request for an injunction and the scheduled handoff took place at midnight.

The transfer involved the internet's domain name system, or DNS, which translates the Web addresses you type into your browser, like "cnet.com," into the numerical language that net-connected computers use to communicate. Under a plan that's been in the works for years, the US Department of Commerce shuttled control of the DNS to a nonprofit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), whose multiple stakeholders include technical experts, as well as representatives of governments and businesses.

Cruz and other critics had argued the transfer could lead to authoritarian countries taking control of the internet and eventually censoring content throughout the world.

[...]

On Wednesday, the attorneys general of Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Texas filed a lawsuit (PDF) to block the turnover. But a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas denied that request for a temporary restraining order.

ICANN said Saturday that the handoff would ensure an open internet.

See our previous story from a few days ago.

Original Submission

Microsoft "extremely careless"

bradley13 writes:

I have a dual-boot machine with Win10 on one partition. This morning, Windows installed a large update with the comment "your machine will restart several times". Sure enough, the update took forever, and afterwards...there's only Windows 10 left.

I haven't yet gone spelunking with a LiveCD, but Win10 updates have been known to nuke entire partitions, not just the bootloader. Time will tell...

For what it's worth, the Windows update history shows: KB 3176937, 3176935, and 3193494. This would appear to be a group of updates that lead to "Windows 10 version 1607".

Microsoft Delivers Another Broken Windows 10 Update

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

This week, Microsoft pushed out another cumulative update and reports of installation problems are widespread. While I don't know how many users are impacted, based on comments sent to me, it's certainly widespread enough that this is well beyond an isolated issue.

The update that is causing the problem, KB3194496, is not installing correctly for users. The update, when it does fail, is causing some machines to restart, often multiple times, as Windows 10 attempts to remove the failed update. Worse, after a restart, the file will attempt to install again resulting in the loop of failed install, reboot, re-install and failure again.

Some users have reported that the cumulative update did install correctly on the second or third attempt while others have said that it fails every time.

[...] Microsoft is pushing the idea that you should always patch your machine on the day the update is released as they often release security patches that fix vulnerabilities. But, until the company can get a handle on their quality control issues, such as the Anniversary update breaking millions of webcams, it feels like every time you run Windows update you are rolling the dice.

Some have found a solution to their problem here.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard about a story that appeared on CNN on September 9, 2016.

From targeted advertising and insurance to education and policing, Cathy O'Neil's new book 'Weapons of Math Destruction' [WMD] looks at how algorithms and big data are targeting the poor, reinforcing racism and amplifying inequality.

[...] In a vacuum, these models are bad enough, but O'Neil emphasizes, "they're feeding on each other." Education, job prospects, debt and incarceration are all connected, and the way big data is used makes them more inclined to stay that way.

"Poor people are more likely to have bad credit and live in high-crime neighborhoods, surrounded by other poor people," she writes. "Once ... WMDs digest that data, it showers them with subprime loans or for-profit schools. It sends more police to arrest them and when they're convicted it sentences them to longer terms."

In turn, a new set of WMDs uses this data to charge higher rates for mortgages, loans and insurance.

[...] "Big Data processes codify the past," O'Neil writes. "They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination, and that's something only humans can provide."

I'm not interested in the story. I'm interested in what it says about once proud CNN's current quality of journalism. Fox News: Left Division?

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/06/technology/weapons-of-math-destruction/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-stocks-weekahead-idUSKCN1202O8

Deutsche Bank will likely cast a pall over equity markets next week as the largest German lender navigates a possible multi-billion dollar settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice [DOJ] over the sale of mortgage-backed bonds. Deutsche shares traded in the United States hit a record low on Thursday, falling as much as 24 percent since the DOJ asked the bank to pay $14 billion to settle charges related to its sale of toxic mortgage bonds before the financial crisis.

But the stock had its best day in five years Friday, on record volume, after news agency AFP reported that Deutsche was nearing a much-lower $5.4 billion settlement with the DOJ. Analysts at Morgan Stanley estimated Deutsche could pay about $6 billion to settle with the DOJ.

Original Submission